BLAKE's questions

Right now I have a vpn from a cisco router (ASA 5505) with a network 192.168.1.0/24 connectiong to a Juniper firewall (SSG-520) with a network 192.168.100.16/28.

I want to reconfigure the subnet on the juniper side to be a /24. I have changed all the interface settings and route on the juniper side, but the VPN disconnects after 90 seconds.

I am pretty sure that the problem is a route on the cisco side. In the logs on the Cisco side it says "192.168.1.1 No translation group found for icmp src outside:192.168.100.1 dst inside:192.168.1.1 (type 8, code 0)"

Previously the Juniper was at the IP 192.168.100.30 (inside the /28 subnet). Now it is at 192.168.100.1.

What is the proper way to recreate the route accross the VPN on the cisco side to make this work?

Right now I have a subnet of 16 IPs. I want all of the ips to be "owned " by my firewall. I have a watchguard firewall statically configured with X.X.X.225 and has X.X.X.226 - 238 as Secondary IPs.

This has been working fine for a few months, but last week, I could only use the first (.225) address.

If I reconfigure my firewall to start at .226 and continue up to .238 I only can use the .226.

I have tried this with multiple firewalls, both Watchguard and Juniper.

The ISP is dumb. Does anyone know why I can only use the first IP in the range?

EDIT: When I first switched to this ISP I had the same problem. It took them 2 weeks to figure out what was wrong. The eventually made it work, but they didn't tell me what they did, and they didn't document it. Now the problem is back and they don't know how to fix it.

I just got Security+ certified and stared to care about my network (or use my newly aquired knowledge to make everything better)

I just installed Snort the open source IDS. I am having one issue erything working correctly, but the graphs in BASE have no words.

_{(source: theitguyrox.com)}

I have googled and found no answers. Haas anyone else seen anything like this?

I am wondering what the correct way to redirect m.mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com/mobile in IIS6.

I have two ways to do it, but I don’t know which is right. First, I can create a new website called "mobile" listening on another IP and have it "redirect to another URL". But that will use up another of my limited IP addresses.

Second, I could try to do the same thing with Host Headers. If I do that, it won’t use up another IP, but could it cause other issues? I am much more familiar with Apache than IIS. If I set up two sites on the same IP using Host Headers, will it be that same config as Using two different IPs?

I don't know if this is posible, but right now we have about 30 employees. Most of them work at our office, but a few work fom home. We have 16 IPs at the office.

For the people that work at home, I added a dns entry [email protected] points to an IP with port 3389 NATed to their desktop at work. They can remote into work fine.

More and more people keep asking for a way to remote into their desktops, but I am out of external IP addresses. I am wondering if there is any easy way to let them all remote in via a single IP, without changing Ports.

I know I can give everyone a differant port number and ask them to remember it, but I dont think that is realistic.

I tried to setup TSWeb on windows 2003, but that still only works if there is an External dns record pointing to an external IP.

Does anyone have any suggestions to making this work?

Also, I have tried using a VPN, but most of the employees are way underwater around computers and cannot understand making a VPN work before remoting in.

I have some questions about updating our Active Directory Schema.

Right now We have 4 Domain Controllers across 3 sites. They are all running Windows Server 2003 with SP1. None of them are R2. They are all running old hardware and need to be replaced. I would like to replace them all with virtual machines. I tried to dcpromo a new VM running Server 2003 R2 and it told me to do the Schema update first. This is where I have some questions.

First: All of my current DC's have retail copies of Windows installed. All of the installation media that I have is OEM. Can I run the ADPrep utility from the OEM Media on a server with Retail Media installed?

Second: Can I run the Schema update from a SP1 DC or does it need to have SP2 installed? I don't mind doing all the updates on the current DC's but I since they will all be replaced, it seems kindof like a waste of time (there are 200+ updates per server.)

Last: I have read this question about Schema update safety, but I don't understand how you can backup and safely restore AD if the update goes wrong. Is the process to reboot each DC into AD Restore Mode and restore them one at a time if the update fails?

Thanks for all your help.

I am trying to create a blackhole (noreply) mailbox in exchange 2010. I want a legitimate email address that will evaporate any email that gets sent to it.

I have been googling and the answer I have come up with is to create a distribution list with no members and give the noreply email alias to that group. This work great for evaporating email, but I cannot give a user permission to 'Send As' a distribution list.

Right now I have a web app that authenticates with my exchange server as [email protected]. It trys to send email out as [email protected]. My exchange server gives a 5.7.1 error. Client does not have permissions to send as this sender.

Does anyone have any idea how to relay with a blackhole email address?

I know that where I have worked, I have pushed alot for virtualizing our servers.

I think that it is much easier to implement and maintain than physical servers.

I have been using Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 since it was released. Right now at my workplace we have 12 VMHosts that hold about 55 VMs. We have 6 other servers that we have been unable to convert to VMs.

I want to know how other people in our field view virtualization. I know that I have had developers dislike the notion of VMs claiming major performance hits.

What do other Sys Admins think about virtualized servers?

Right now my active directory is failing a dcdiag test. I can find no info online about this error.

When I run dcdiag /test:crossrefvalidation, I get the output:

....
Doing primary tests
    Testing server: Default-First-Site-Name\ad01

    Running partition tests on : ForestDnsZones
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            ......................... ForestDnsZones passed test CrossRefValidation

    Running partition tests on : DomainDnsZones
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            ......................... DomainDnsZones passed test CrossRefValidation

    Running partition tests on : Schema
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            ......................... Schema passed test CrossRefValidation

    Running partition tests on : Configuration
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            ......................... Configuration passed test CrossRefValidation

    Running partition tests on : mydomain
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            ......................... mydomain passed test CrossRefValidation

    Running partition tests on : t
        Starting test: CrossRefValidation
            This cross-ref has a non-standard dNSRoot attribute.
             Cross-ref DN:
            CN=a3a24d3a-4782-460b-9148-86ac2d86b9ae,CN=Partitions,CN=Configuration,
DC=mydomain,DC=com
             nCName attribute (Partition name): DC=t
             Bad dNSRoot attribute: dc01.mydomain.com
             Check with your network administrator to make sure this dNSRoot
            attribute is correct, and if not please change the attribute to the
            value below.
              dNSRoot should be: t
               It appears this partition (DC=t) failed to get completely created.
               This cross-ref
               (CN=a3a24d3a-4782-460b-9148-86ac2d86b9ae,CN=Partitions,CN=Configurat
ion,DC=mydomain,DC=com)
                is dead and should be removed from the Active Directory.
            ......................... t failed test CrossRefValidation
....

I used the LDP tool from the windows support tools. I searched for the dnsRoot attribute in "cn=partitions,cn=configuration,dc=mydomain,dc=com", with the filter "(&(objectcategory=crossref)(systemFlags:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=5))"

I got the result:

***Searching...
ldap_search_s(ld, "cn=partitions,CN=Configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=com", 1, "(&
(objectcategory=crossref)(systemFlags:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=5))", attrList,  0, &msg)
Result <0>: (null)
Matched DNs: 
Getting 3 entries:
>> Dn: CN=65502be3-fc90-442a-83d8-4b3b91e82439,CN=Partitions,CN=Configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=com
    1> dnsRoot: ForestDnsZones.mydomain.com; 
>> Dn: CN=a3a24d3a-4782-460b-9148-86ac2d86b9ae,CN=Partitions,CN=Configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=com
    1> dnsRoot: ad01.mydomain.com; 
>> Dn: CN=f0ef5771-6225-4984-acd9-c08f582eb4e2,CN=Partitions,CN=Configuration,DC=mydomain,DC=com
    1> dnsRoot: DomainDnsZones.mydomain.com;

It looks like the bad partition has the name of my first domain controller 'ad01.mydomain.com'.

I have googled for a while and have not been able to find any help or documentation about application partitions in Active Directory.

Does anyone have any advice on how to cleanup this partition (or what the partition is for)?

Does anyone know the repercussions for deleting this partition?

Last night I shutdown my Exchange 2003 Virtual Machine, I added a new VHD (For backups), and booted it again. Now I can't POP3 email from it with Outlook 2007. In Outlook I get the error:

Task '[email protected] - Receiving' reported error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

Does anybody know what is wrong? All I did was a reboot. I haven't formated the added disk. There are no weird errors in the event log.

I can still send mail with Outlook over port 25.

I can send and recieve mail with OWA.

I can POP3 the mail to my phone (it take about 15 minutes after sending a message, but I do get it eventually).

EDIT:
The 'Microsoft Exchange POP3' Service says that it is started but if I stop it and try to start it again, it fails saying 'Could not start the Microsoft Exchange POP3 service on Local Computer. Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.'

I did some googling and someone on exchangefreaks.com said that if I use task manager to 'End Task' on inetinfo.exe, then I can start the POP3 service fine.

Does anyone know what causes this problem? I am fine for now since I did get the Service started, but If it does this after every reboot...

Right now My company is on Google's Blacklist somewhere someone in my company is spamming google. I would like to view the Browsing History on my clients computers to try to find out where it is coming from.
Does anyone know an easy way to do this? Is there a WMI object that can help me. I would like to write a vbscript that can take a computer name and return their Browsing History.

All the computers are in a single active directory domain. Most computers are using IE7, some are using 8 and some are using Firefox.

Is this possible?

we are trying to replace our current exchange server with a new one. The old one is bad hardware that isn't configured properly. We would like to add a second Exchange Server to the network and slowly migrate the needed items to it.

Right now we have about 150 clients using outlook 2007 to connect to the Exchange Server with the Exchange connection. They are all configured to point to the old server's hostname. Is the any way to change the name of the server that they point to via the registry or a group policy?

I downloaded some new group policy templates for office 2007 but I can't change that setting in there.

I have been googling and can't find any way less than manualy changing it on every computer.

I have an interesting problem. One of my clients can't access our file server by hostname. If I open explorer and type \\Server1 all I see is a single folder, but if I type it's IP \\10.10.10.10, I can see all the shares on the machine. I can see that the DNS is resolving correctly. If I ping Server1 it will resolve to 10.10.10.10. What would cause this?

• The client is running Windows Vista.
• The server is running Windows Server 2003.
• He has permissions for all the shares on the server.
• This is part of an Active Directory domain.

I have been playing around with phpMyAdmin and I do think that it is a good tool, but I have read a lot on the internet about security holes. Would you recomend installing/using phpMyAdmin on a prduction webserver?

I figure that if I only allow access via localhost, and change it to a non standard port would help. But is that enough?

I am trying to convert a physical server to a virtual one. I know that there are tools for this, but they either cost a lot or have extreme requirements.

I have tried to use Norton Ghost to make a copy of the disk, then restore that copy inside a VM. I made this work, but after I restore it, Windows won't boot. I can boot to a PE disk and verify that the file system is intact, but I think the hard disk drivers for Windows are wrong. The physical server was a Dell PowerEdge 1950 with a SCSI PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) 6 card.

Is there a way to add the VM's hard disk drivers to the drive from a Windows PE disk, without booting into Windows? I am using Virtual Server 2005.

I know that I can do it on the physical machine before I take the image, but it is a production machine that I don't want to take a chance with.

EDIT 1: Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit has extreme requirements, because it needs ADS installed. The only time I sucessfully used it I had to build a whole temporary test network around it (a big hassle). There is also System Center's VMMC (very expensive).

When I try to boot the new VM, I see the POST screen, and if I have a bootable CD loaded it will boot to the CD. If not, then the CPU usage drops to 0 and the VM locks up. I have tried to update the hal.dll in the system32 folder, but that didn't fix it.
I think that I need to disable the SCSI driver from the 1950 that is trying to get loaded.
The VM/physical machine that I am converting is running Windows 2003.

i was reading this question How to rename machines after image install and I was wondering what you do for a linux machine. I am a windows guy and am clueless about linux. If i have a linux image or VM, is there a NewSid or SysPrep program that I have to run if I restore the image to a new machine?

I am asking more about a NewSid program rather than SysPrep, I want to make an image of an already installed machine, I don't need sysPrp to do the installing for me.

Right now I have two servers. Server A runs a vbscript that copies files from Server B via UNC paths. Both servers have different login information. The password on Server B was just changed and now Server A can't connect.
Before I would have to use Run to open the UNC path and enter the login info, but now after the password was changed I get this error:

\\SERVER-B\Backup is not accessible. Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more that one user name, are not allower. Disconnect all previous connections to the server of shared resource and try again.

I have gone into control panel and removed everything from Stored User Names and Password, and that didn't work. There are no other users logged in either. How do I disconnect the connection without rebooting the Servers?

Both Servers are running windows 2003 standard w/SP2. And I do not have the ability to change the password back.